Are your characters exactly how you imagine them for the first time?

[AdamBraveOfficial]

Hi folks!

During the creation of my https://tapas.io/series/Gods-VS-Dragons I must admit that the appearance of some characters dont exactly end up how I imagine them for the first time.

Some times I end up preferring the "new" end result but, to be honest, some other times I just don't bother to change it since I'm in a rush to publish material. And this happened with some characters which will be important for the story.

Does this happen to you?

[silverraven0]

I think most peoples (including me).

If you happen to read some Popular manga or webcomic artist first character draft, you can see them changing either hair, eyes and such. That's happen, so there's nothing to worry about it.

[CarltonIsaac]

Does this happen to you?

Yes. It's a process of evolution and refinement, but works mostly if it is required for the story.

[Kelheor]

I agree that it's very common indeed! It's cool to see the comparison original one-shots of manga with the running series to see how the author improved the character.
For me they usually are how I imagined them for the first time and I really dislike changing my characters after I created them =)

When I think about a character, a picture just pops into my mind and I cannot really get rid of it Some things may change of course, but the overall appearance will be pretty much the same.

It also happens that some characters are harder to refine (for no apparent reason!), like I don't particularly like their hairdo or don't like their facial expression, and the result looks kinda OOC to me, but I cannot really comprehend what's the problem in
Like I have this guy, Cano, for almost 4 years already, I only redraw him once a year, but only now I got the look I like. I hope I got

[Iris-Grimoire]

Not exactly, but it loses something if I move away from the initial feeling the moment I said 'i REALLY want the character to be this'. Mortimer was always scrawny, tall and looking sad; Veriesin was always lightly armored, dynamic but not too acessorized; etc etc.

It's still important to do many drafts of the character. It's crazy how much you can move inside that initial idea and still get wildly different results!

Some examples of OC designs because I lost Mort and Veri's original sketches from long ago -

The first idea isn't bad, but it's always rough. Polish is just as important, if not more.

edit: since people are also bringing up the writing side, yes, but the changes come with maturity. Just sticking to Mortimer as an example, his character was very much woe is me, my cool powers make me a monster character back in the day, because to me that was the height of drama. Growing up I realized he never really had much justification for that behavior, so I not only changed the story to have a reasoning, I also made him more meek, restrained, easily startled despite his size/strength, passive, to really show that his current life binds him to not be the boastful nerd he wants to be, not entirely because of society but because of himself as well. It wouldn't have happened without my own life experience and media that I consumed along the way.

[Kelheor]

it loses something if I move away from the initial feeling the moment I said 'i REALLY want the character to be this

This is really nicely put

[MK_Wizard]

Not exactly. Hyde was meant to have darker features kind of like a traditional troll, but he looked too sinister so I went with making him look goofier and I changed his colouring to be lighter. As for Jekyll, he had more boyish features, but that made him look too young so I gave him the long nose and the dark hair.

Finally, Poole was meant to be a much darker and hardened character, but that version didn't sit well with me so I changed him into a sweet fatherly like old man.

[nathanKmcwilliams]

Not really, mine evolve over the course of many drawings, then I finally figure it out. I rarely have an exact image in mind.

And...I have a bunch of different versions of my main character. He's changed every time I created a draft for the story, and over the last 12 years (really 19 since I originally came up with him in 2001) he's changed...a...lot. Eventually I'd like to do a crossover comic where they all meet to defeat a multiversal threat.

This is like...half of the different versions, especially after flipping through my old sketchbooks going back 10 years, there's so many xD

[darthmongoose]

I think you never truly know your characters til you've made the first ten pages or so. In fact when I run D&D games, I advise players not to make their backstory and personality traits on their sheet too concrete or detailed until they've played the character for a session or two and really know what the character is like. When you make your character, it's kind of like you've mixed and kneaded the dough... but you don't know them til you see what comes out the oven.

Rekki from Errant is an interesting case because she's a rebooted character, so going in I was like "well yeah, Rekki is Rekki, I've been writing her for years" ... except it turned out that she wasn't. Due to the different sorts of characters that resonate with me as a thirtysomething living now than a twentysomething in the 00s, while Rekki is still this very brash, impulsive character who tends to take on more than she can deal with, she's a different spin on it. Rekki in the old comic, Fan Dan Go was a cocky 00s "strong female character", she always had this cocky lopsided grin and sassy poses, she was always snarky and talking back and she was always laughing and grinning in fights and she was kind of a tsundere. Rekki in Errant is one of the least snarky people in the cast; she's sincere, dutiful and down to earth, and rather than being shouty and highly strung about everything, she tends to be a bit grumpy and blunt. Instead of being too cool for school, Rekki is now this burned out workaholic who's trying her best and struggling with how complex everything always is, closer to a character like Korra, Netflix She-Ra or Leslie Knope. You could say it's almost like the same character but interpreted as a gen X-er and then as a Millennial

[byelacey]

oof, definitely not. in both looks and attitude. here's a little over-time visual evolution of the main characters from my comic!

[Jophiel]

A lot more than I think ahah. My aesthetic preferences change over time and sometimes I pick up small design traits I found cool from other media and whatnot. A lot of my characters had phases where they are a reminiscent of 2000-2006 anime and casual clothing, the goth phase, and the current one is just a mix of victorian mixed with modern. Some designs were also tweaked to fit their job, personality, or setting they are from more- and what kind of environment they might have been raised in etc. So far, the only ones I could think that underwent a huge difference is their god but she's a spoiler for now hh.

I liked making a lot of twins before so most of the other halves were changed to look different as well. Initially, the twins on the example looked like each other's clones, gray hair even at a young age, and all matched the duller theme around 2013-16. To build a conflict in the relationship between the two since both might have been handled the same in another setting, but not together.

So it was kinda like a shadow of another. The story before had the guy dressed up as his late sister so that story idea lasted until 2016 until I scrapped it off when he went a personality change.

The guy in 2014 isn't actually his first design tho but one of the other directions I went with. At the end, I just really liked most of his design traits and initial concept from what I can remember and it seemed more fitting to have it as the current due to his personality and job. It's a bit close to the 2017 one but with more proper hair (no white highlights), hues of brown and the skin is more flesh-like and not paper white. The other reason for straying away from being direct clones was that they were raised in separate homes with different parent/parental figure.

I think I'm alright with their designs as of the moment.

[AbelDraws]

Oh no, not at all, especially my main character hahahaha.

The gap between his original concept and what he is now is very, very big partly because I was 13 when I first created him and the basic structure of his story and I was very inexperienced tho. He was a very edgy character, mad at the world, ready to kill and all that stuff because of what happened to him (he was a good boy deep down, but he had to grow a veeery thick skin to deal with what happened to him and all that).

The story hasn't changed much, but as I started writing more about the character and the story in detail he evolved a lot and didn't do a lot of stuff he did back then.

Every character has changed a lot since their creation tho. A character of mine (ginger, a girl who has already appeared) was created just because I wanted to create a lesbian that would like another character in the story. Now she's one of my favourites in regards of character development, she's grown miles from that flat beginning (she's still very very very gay tho, that didn't change one bit x'D).

All the villains have changed a lot as well. At first I only knew what they had to do and placed one dimensional characters in those roles. Then, again, I started writing about them and they became waaay more complex (and surprised me a LOT sometimes x'D once they're their own people they do unexpected stuff, it be like that).

There's one character who's an exception tho. She's the one who has changed the least, I think. Everything was kinda set from the beginning - I added a lot of details, changed her backstory a bit, more character traits, more depth in general to the character... But all her core traits were already perfectly stablished since the beginning (she just came to my house one day, kicked down the door and said "I'm your new forever fave now", basically hahahahaha).

[Darth_Biomech]

Sans for the general art evolution that just results in me drawing better and more correct details, I think my characters change very little. The biggest change generally was the cloth designs for a spaceship uniform, that I commissioned to an artist that actually knows how to design clothes, but that's all.

There's one exception in a character named Virus though - he went through a complete redesign a few years back:
https://www.deviantart.com/darth-biomech/art/Virus-charsheet-outdated-282963732
https://www.deviantart.com/darth-biomech/art/Virus-Character-Sheet-565974386